Among the things that I missed while I was away was the release of an academic report that ranked Pittsburgh as the third most literate city in the US -- behind Minneapolis and Seattle and ahead of such bastions of would-be pedants as Boston and San Francisco.

Since some seemingly obvious information (say, support for independent booksellers) suggests that the results are upside down, my first instinct would be to critique the study's criteria. But the criteria (which are online along with the report) don't seem obviously unreasonable to me -- especially the bit that tries to capture the quality of public and public school libraries. Any city in California that tried to compete on that basis would lose every time.